I'm Fine and Neither Are You(73)

“I’ll say. Cess, anything you want to do tonight? We could go out to dinner.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“No problem,” I said. “How about a puzzle? Or coloring?”

She shook her head.

I eyed her. “What do you say about writing a book?”

“Us?”

“Why not?”

“Okay!” she said.

We decamped to the craft station Jenny had set up in Cecily’s playroom. After I had spread out paper and handed Cecily a box full of markers and colored pencils, I said, “So. Where should we start?”

She gave me a funny look. “At the beginning.”

I laughed. “Right.”

We decided we would write a book about a little girl who accidentally finds herself in a magical forest and has to learn to speak to animals to survive. One page became three. Then five, then ten. As we worked—Cecily dictating as I wrote at the bottom, occasionally making suggestions, then handing her the page so she could illustrate it—I felt like a young girl myself, escaping troubles real and imagined as I slipped into another world.

“What do you think?” I asked as I stapled our finished pages together.

“Good. I’m going to show my mommy.” She looked up at me with embarrassment as she realized what she had just said, then quickly glanced down at the book.

“It’s okay, Cess,” I said. “Happens to me all the time.”

“What do you do?” she said quietly. “When that happens?”

“Well . . . sometimes I’m just sad. But sometimes I send your mama a little message. Sort of like a prayer. Sometimes she even talks back to me.”

Her lower lip quivered. “I’m going to tell her I might write a book about her one day.”

I smiled. “I think she’d really like that. I’ve always wanted to write books one day, too. Your mommy knew that about me.”

“Really?”

“Yep. I wrote lots of stories before Stevie was born.”

“You don’t anymore?”

I shook my head.

“Why not?” she asked.

It was a damn good question, and my usual excuse-filled answers weren’t going to fly with her. “Well, sweetie, sometimes I tell myself I don’t have the time or I’m too tired, but now that I’m thinking about it, the truth is that I haven’t made it a priority.”

She ran a finger over the cover page. With her dark bob and rosebud of a mouth, she looked so much like Jenny that I could have cried. I found myself hoping to God she would have all of her mother’s strengths and none of her struggles. “You still can, right?” Her eyes were lit up, and she was regarding me with the kind of hope that spreads on contact.

I laughed and gave her a squeeze. “I still can,” I said. “And I’m not about to take that for granted.”



Matt turned on a television show for Cecily, then led me upstairs. I hesitated before walking through the door of Jenny’s office; I had not set foot there since finding her in her armchair. I was relieved to see Matt had removed the chair. But the rest of the room was exactly as it had been before that day, and a chill went up my spine.

“I got Jenny’s log-in info from Tiana, and she walked me through how to post on the site,” said Matt, opening the laptop on the clear Lucite desk where Jenny had worked. “You said you emailed yourself what you wanted to write?”

“Yes,” I said. “Did you want to read it first?”

“No, I trust you,” he said.

Did he? I couldn’t read him.

“Once you copy it, you can paste it into this area,” he said, pointing to the blog dashboard he had just pulled up. He glanced at me quickly. “I’ll give you some space.”

Despite my mixed feelings about Matt, I didn’t want to be left alone in Jenny’s office. But he was already gone. I would just have to work quickly.

I had just pasted my post when a folder on the left side of the screen caught my eye.

Drafts (1)

I shouldn’t, I told myself, but my hand was already moving the mouse to the folder. I hovered the cursor over it for a second, then clicked.

The draft could have been a snippet of a previous post, a random thought she had decided not to publish—anything, really. There was no real reason for me to feel nervous, but my hand was shaking as I clicked on the lone draft in the folder.

As I began to read, I understood why.

I want you to know this website isn’t a lie. It’s really my life. But it’s only the parts I’ve chosen to share with you. And I love sharing it. I truly do. Every time I write a post, I remember all that is so wonderful about family and friendship and the countless blessings God has given me. Sharing that with you is like a daily meditation in gratitude. And your comments make my days brighter. They make me feel that I have a bigger purpose.

But some of you have written here and elsewhere online to say that what I show you here makes you feel bad about yourself. And oh, how that hurts me—more than you may ever know, because it was never my intention to make it seem as though you, dear reader, weren’t enough.

You are more than enough.

But if you’re feeling lacking or sometimes wish you could run far away from the demands of being a woman in this world, know that I understand that, too. I may not convey it adequately, but I do feel that way sometimes. Most of the time, if I’m honest.